✊️🏙 HQ2 bidding is over 💰 Pollution is killing millions of people 🚙 Google extending its monopoly to the city 📱

The bidding war for Amazon’s second headquarters wrapped up this week with a bunch of stunts by mayors across North America that should make their citizens profoundly ashamed. While HQ2 will bring jobs, it will also bring social problems that many of these mayors are not preparing for — check out issue #3 for more — but I was happy to see Ontario, at least, say it would not offer Amazon financial incentives.

A really scary report on the death toll of global pollution also came out this week, and it should have us all worried. Even those who are skeptical about whether or not greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet should want to reduce them to keep millions of people from dying every year; and if we’re really to take this problem seriously, we need to get all cars, not just EVs, out of our cities as soon as possible.

Finally, Toronto is teaming up with Google to redevelop a section of its eastern waterfront with the goal of showing how technology can enhance urban life, but there are really big questions about what’s really motivating Google’s involvement in the project. Is the tech monopoly really dedicated to improving our cities, or is it responding to its insatiable thirst for data by trying to become the private platform for urban services? That doesn’t sound like a positive outcome to me.

Some of the ridiculous stunts pulled by mayors across Canada and the United States to try to lure Amazon. I can’t imagine how much time and money was wasted on this bidding process that could have gone into more productive activities.

A new study looks at how rents would increase in 15 cities across the United States if Amazon sets up shop there. As I showed in issue 3, there would be major social costs to Amazon HQ2 that a lot of cities which have entered the bidding process don’t seem to have taken into account.

Continuing from that last point, I do have to give some credit to Ontario, which promised that if a city in the province wins the bidding process, it will not provide subsidies, but will instead make further investments in education and talent. (Though they should probably also promise to build a lot more public housing, regardless of whether Amazon comes or not.)

Toxic air, water, soils and workplaces are responsible for the diseases that kill one in every six people around the world, the landmark report found, and the true total could be millions higher because the impact of many pollutants are poorly understood. The deaths attributed to pollution are triple those from Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

Looking to curb pollution, a number of countries in Asia and Europe are looking to ban gas-powered cars, and some cities are even trying to ban cars altogether. This is a positive step, but will it be enough?

While moving to electric vehicles would go some way to reducing that pollution, it wouldn’t be enough, and there are many other problems that vehicles cause in urban environments. Land use is just one example:

We currently demand considerable amounts of valuable urban land for roads. London allocates almost 24% of its land area to roads and supporting infrastructure. In many US cities this can be as high as 40%.

Seattle is bucking the national trend of ridership decline with a 4.1% increase in 2016. Not only are its voters supporting transit by approving ballot measures to increase funding, but the city has a dedicated street that’s closed to car traffic during rush hour to make bus trips faster.

Toronto is teaming up with Google to redevelop 750 acres on the eastern waterfront, but there are reasons to be concerned. The initial site is only 12 acres, and Google has really only committed to lead consultations thus far. The company likely won’t actually build anything, but wants to provide the digital services to shows what a city should look like in the 21st century.

Writing in The Guardian, Evgeny Morozov provides a good reason to be skeptical about Google motivations, especially given the increasing concern about its monopoly position. Is Sidewalk Labs just another ploy to gather more data on us?

Alphabet essentially wants to be the default platform for other municipal services. Cities, it says, have always been platforms; now they are simply going digital. “The world’s great cities are all hubs of growth and innovation because they leveraged platforms put in place by visionary leaders,” states the proposal. “Rome had aqueducts, London the Underground, Manhattan the street grid.” […] Amid all this platformaphoria, one could easily forget that the street grid is not typically the property of a private entity, capable of excluding some and indulging others. Would we want Trump Inc to own it? Probably not. So why hurry to give its digital equivalent to Alphabet?

LONGREAD: This is probably a good time for a refresher on the history of cities and the particular way neoliberalism has privatized urban space.

Neoliberalism has also created new systems of governance that integrate state and corporate interests, and through the application of money power, it has ensured that the disbursement of the surplus through the state apparatus favours corporate capital and the upper classes in shaping the urban process. Raising the proportion of the surplus held by the state will only have a positive impact if the state itself is brought back under democratic control.

Increasingly, we see the right to the city falling into the hands of private or quasi-private interests. In New York City, for example, the billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is reshaping the city along lines favourable to developers, Wall Street and transnational capitalist-class elements, and promoting the city as an optimal location for high-value businesses and a fantastic destination for tourists. He is, in effect, turning Manhattan into one vast gated community for the rich. In Mexico City, Carlos Slim had the downtown streets re-cobbled to suit the tourist gaze. Not only affluent individuals exercise direct power. In the town of New Haven, strapped for resources for urban reinvestment, it is Yale, one of the wealthiest universities in the world, that is redesigning much of the urban fabric to suit its needs. Johns Hopkins is doing the same for East Baltimore, and Columbia University plans to do so for areas of New York, sparking neighbourhood resistance movements in both cases. The right to the city, as it is now constituted, is too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires.